Management

Gil Elbaz, Founder and CEO ·

Gil Elbaz is an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology. Factual, founded in 2007, is Gil's second startup. In 1998, Gil co-founded Applied Semantics Inc. (ASI) which developed contextual advertising products, including ASI's AdSense. In 2003, Google acquired ASI and Gil stayed on through 2007 as the director of engineering for the Santa Monica office, continuing to work on AdSense.

Gil earned his bachelor's degree from Caltech with a double major in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics. Gil serves on the Board of Directors of the X Prize Foundation.

Bill Michels, SVP Product and Partnerships ·

Bill joined Factual in 2009 and prior to that, worked at Yahoo! for about six years, the last two of which he was the GM and Senior Director of the Yahoo! Search Platform. While there, he managed the product management, design, marketing and business development functions for Yahoo! BOSS, which grew from inception to over +1B queries/month. Before this he was the Director of International Search Business Operations & Product Strategy, a +$1B P&L with 500+ employees. Other experience includes Equity Research Associate at UBS on the #1 ranked Institutional Investor telecom research team. At one point he wore a white coat and worked in a solid-state physics research lab. He has an MBA from Columbia University Business School and a BA in Geology from Colby College.

Boris Shimanovsky, VP of Engineering ·

Boris took his first programming course in the seventh grade and wrote a video game as his first class project. Prior to joining Factual, he was CTO at Xap, which he helped build from eight employees to a thriving business with millions of users and over a hundred employees. His junior year in college, he built a site that quickly became the web’s 27th most trafficked and then optimized it enough to run from two machines in his den. He’s not retired now because he really wanted to graduate. Boris holds a BS in Physiological Science and an MS in Computer Science, both from UCLA. He put himself through school working night shifts as an ambulance driver. Boris lives in Los Angeles with his badass wife and three amazing children. He is a lousy philosopher, a mediocre poet, and will someday become a great chef.

Tyler Bell, VP of Product ·

Tyler Bell oversees Factual's product initiatives in global place data and contextual audience platforms. He is a former archaeologist who specialized in the medieval reuse of the Roman landscape, with more topical publications in GIS and the use of anisotropic cost surfaces to understand the ancient landscape. He has broad interests in open source and place-based information systems, and previously led Product for Yahoo's Geo Technologies Group. Tyler far-too-intermittently writes about data-, semantic- and geo-technologies for O'Reilly Radar.

Eric Lui, Director of Data Operations ·

Eric joined Factual as employee #10 in 2008. As Director of Data Operations, he leads Factual's quirky and fearless data operations team as they build the world's best datasets. Previously, Eric hacked together projects at Pitzer College and two Southern California start-ups. During his university years, he was focused on the politics of international aid, peace, and security, and spent most of his disposable income traveling to Model UN Conferences. Eric credits his cheerful demeanor and cranky inner monologue to a summer working at Disneyland. He claims all the credit for Factual's early interest in functional programming. Eric double-majored in Political Science and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Outside of work, he is a voracious boardgamer, student of religion, and avowed skeptic of his fiancee's wedding planning.

Vikas Gupta, Director of Marketing and Operations ·

Vikas joined Factual in 2011 and runs Factual’s marketing department alongside responsibilities in financial reporting and analysis. Prior to Factual, Vikas was at LoopNet Inc. for 3 years where he did marketing strategy and analytics for both LoopNet’s core commercial real estate business and their business for sale subsidiary BizBuySell. Prior to LoopNet he was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company where he served clients in financial services, airlines, and chemicals in a variety of capacities including strategy, operations, and post-merger management. He earned a BA in Business-Economics from UCLA and an MBA from the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. He is a member of Factual’s unofficial board gaming club, avid traveller, and a huge fan of the Kindle.

Brinton Harris, Sr. Director Business Development ·

Brinton joined Factual in '09 as part of the original business team and now manages the data licensing group. Prior to Factual, he was the first BD hire at YuMe Inc (NYSE: YUME) where he helped launch their publisher video ad network and grew it to what was at the time the largest in the space. Other experience includes four years of business development for Yahoo! Search Marketing in Los Angeles with a focus on Health, Lifestyle, and Finance verticals, and managing digital strategy for large global brands as an Account Director for online ad agency Avenue A in New York (now Razorfish). Brinton grew up in Seattle, got his BA of History from Yale, and used to enjoy camping, swimming and biking, but now he gets most of his exercise chasing around his three young boys.

Chris Yatrakis, Sr. Director Business Development ·

Chris is the Head of Mobile Business Development for Factual where he is responsible for work with clients like MoPub and Turn. Prior to that, he was at Millennial Media for five years where he served in a variety of roles including Regional-Vice President and Strategic Business Development. As a key pre-IPO contributor, Chris worked closely with many early adopters of Mobile advertising including Razorfish, Universal McCann, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Best Buy, Nike, Carnival Cruises and American Airlines. Prior to Millennial, Chris worked at DoubleClick for four years in the TechSolutions team and at Ziff-Davis, PC Week for five years after serving as a media planner on NEC Technologies (back in the heady days of CD-Rom Multimedia). He earned a BA in Government and Anthropology from Skidmore College and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife with whom he enjoys frequent travel to Greece at every possible free moment.